Commontide
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 3rd Sunday of Epiphany
Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Epiphany
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who took on our mortal flesh to reveal his glory; that he might bring us out of darkness and into his own glorious light.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Bishop, Missionary, and Ecumenist
Anglican Commemoration
Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was an English missionary in India, a bishop of the Church of South India from its first day, and afterwards a parish minister in Birmingham. He gave his working life to the union of divided churches and his last decades to arguing that the Gospel is public truth. The Anglican Church in North America commemorates him on January 29 as Bishop and Ecumenist.
James Edward Lesslie Newbigin was born in Newcastle, England, on December 8, 1909. Educated at Cambridge and ordained in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, he served briefly in Scotland before offering himself for missionary service in India in 1936. He served with the Church of Scotland mission in South India and was ordained bishop in the Church of South India in 1947, becoming Bishop of Madurai and Ramnad from 1947 to 1974. During his 38 years in India, he developed a sophisticated theology of mission and inculturation, working to establish indigenous Indian Christian leadership and thought. He was elected chair of the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches (1954-1968) and served as director of the Missionary Division of the WCC. After retiring from India and returning to England at age 65, Newbigin did not retire from ministry but instead accepted pastoral responsibility in a United Reformed Church congregation in inner-city Birmingham (1980-1989), ministering in a secular, post-Christian English context. This late-life urban pastorate informed his final and most prophetic work, specifically his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), which addressed the challenge of Christian witness in pluralistic, secular Western societies. His other major works include Foolishness to the Greeks (1986), The Other Side of 1984 (1983), and The Open Secret (1978). He died on January 31, 1998, having profoundly influenced Anglican and ecumenical thought on mission, contextualization, and the nature of Gospel witness in both non-Christian and post-Christian contexts.
Newbigin is honored in Anglican, Presbyterian, and ecumenical circles as one of the greatest missiologists of the twentieth century. His conviction that the Church's primary task is to bear witness to the Gospel in its local context—whether in India's Hindu-majority society or England's secular post-Christendom—established a framework for thinking about Christian inculturation and witness. He exemplifies the Anglican commitment to theological rigor, ecumenical cooperation, and the contextualization of faith. His late-life urban ministry in Birmingham demonstrated that missionary theology is not peripheral to Western church life but central to faithful witness in secular societies. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society remains foundational for post-Christendom ecclesiology and missiology.